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View of the entire near-infrared sky

Release Date: March 10, 2010 - Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported, out to more than 2.5 billion light-years.

 

This all-sky view of the entire near-infrared sky reveals the distribution of galaxies beyond the Milky Way and has been desaturated to serve as the background for the dark flow plots. The image is derived from the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog, which contains more than 1.5 million galaxies, and the Point Source Catalog, which holds nearly 500 million stars within the Milky Way. The galaxies are color coded for distances obtained by various surveys. The nearest sources are blue (redshifts less than 0.01), moderately distant sources (redshifts between 0.01 and 0.04) are green, and red represents the farthest sources that 2MASS resolves (between redshifts of 0.04 and 0.1)

 

 

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/Dr. T.H. Jarrett/IPAC/Caltech

 

To learn more go to:

 

www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2010/10-023.html

 

To see other visualizations of Dark Flow go to:

 

svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10580

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Uploaded on March 10, 2010
Taken on March 10, 2010